Orebound

You mine, smith, fish and fight in real time in a hand-designed world, and from your first minute a summoned monster fights alongside you. Summoning is the spine of the game rather than something unlocked late — your own skills and your summon's growth are twin progressions that start together and interleave from then on.

The fighting is Old School RuneScape's: an attack first rolls to land against the defence for that style, then rolls its damage, so nothing is certain either way. Melee, Ranged and Magic each carry their own ladder of weapons and spells. Everything resolves on a shared three-hundred-millisecond tick, and the screen is built to hide it — attacks wind up before their tick so the blow lands on the beat, and every hit is a number over the head it came off rather than invisible bookkeeping.

It is the ground-up rebuild of Mine Monsters, written from scratch rather than grown out of it. The two are different games aimed at different people: Mine Monsters was built with and for an eight-year-old, while this one runs grounded and with teeth, closer to the games it takes its skill ladders from.

It runs in the browser with no install. Play as a guest and the save lives in the device's own storage; making an account moves it to the cloud and carries the guest progress across, so trying it first costs nothing.

Multiplayer is the project's first priority and is the least finished thing in it. Signed-in players already see each other standing in the camp square, but the parts that make it a game played together — joining someone's dungeon, teams of up to four, staked duels — are specified and not built. The name is a working one too, and is not settled.